A MODERN BAND OF BROTHERS

I started out this evening with an entry that was short and snarky. I took it out and put it back in. But, this is a great story and I wanted to post it separately.

I’d love someone from our security establishment to tell me how national security was helped out by this incident and I’m sure the whole story will play really well with the Dutch.

This story is by Mike Francis of the Portland Oregonian.

NEW ‘BAND OF BROTHERS’ JOINS BATTLE TO RETRIEVE LIGHTER FOR WWII VET

The Zippo lighter rests, gleaming, comfortably in the palm, no bigger than a combat medal. It is a small, silvery thing with a thumb wheel and a hinged lid, but this one has no flint or lighter fluid.

What makes it special is who it belongs to, where it’s been and what it says on the outside.

On one polished side, it has an insignia showing a bald eagle with its talons extended, landing between a pair of dice on a cream colored, fan-shaped field, surrounded by a circle of navy blue. On the other side is an engraved map, showing spots named Son, Veghel, Grave, Nijmegen, and Arnheim.

One side of the lid says “Operation Market Garden,” “60 years." the other side says “Bill Wingett.”

For about a week, the lighter was in the luggage of Wingett, a member of Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, a legendary unit known to most Americans as “The Band of Brothers.”

Wingett, who will turn 83 Sunday, lives in Salem. On June 16, he was returning from a trip to Europe as a guest of a group of Dutch people who wanted to celebrate the World War II exploits of Easy Company, from the invasion of Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge. Wingett had been back so tome of the places, but this was his first time to return to Bastogne, where Easy Company endured a brutally harsh and deadly winter in 1944.

“I didn’t enjoy the feeling that friends of mine had died there in the vicinity,” Wingett said Thursday, from the home of his daughter in Southern California.

Easy Company took part in Operation Market Garden, an effort to capture bridges in German occupied Dutch territory, That campaign became the subject of a book and movie called “A Bridge Too Far.”

While Wingett and his companions were in Europe for the reunion tour, they were presented the custom-made Zippos, which replicate the company’s 1941-style lighters. Wingett had it in his luggage when he flew home. When it showed up on thescreening machines at Washington Dulles International airport – after the flight across the Atlantic – an airport security screener told him he had a lighter in his bag, and he’d have to surrender it. Wingett balked.

It doesn’t have fuel and it doesn’t have flint, he pointed out. How can it be considered a lighter?
Sorry, the screener said. It’s forbidden.

“Maybe we’d better get one of your supervisors,” he said recounting the conversation. The supervisor came over, listened to Wingett’s appeal, and told him he’d have to give up the lighter. So Wingett said, “Look, can we ask the pilot to take it and hold it, then give it to me when we reach San Francisco?”

The group went into a little room to ask another supervisor. “She just shook her head and said no airline is going to take responsibility for it.” Wingett said.

Wingett, who had to board his flight, gave up. He took some brochures that offered instructions about how to reclaim property from the Transportation Security Administration then flew home without the lighter. “It was a comedy of errors,” he said, “and I probably didn’t help by creating a bit of a scene when they took it.”

In Salem the next day, Kevin Coady, an Oregon Army National Guardsman who is a friend and admirer of Wingett’s, heard the story. He said Wingett, who is hard of hearing had tried calling the TSA, but couldn’t hear the commands of the voice-mail system. Stuck, he gave up.

“He had this look in his eye,” said Coady, who resolved to help. “I said, ‘I’ll do my best.’ Who wouldn’t?”

So Coady wrote and rewrote a passionate e-mail to United Air Lines, the TSA and a friend he knew from his Army service in Germany. Matt Kozatek.

When Kozatek, now retired from the Army, got the e-mail, he remembered Coady’s stories about Wingett and another Easy Company veteran from Salem, Don Malarkey.

Kozatek, whose father served in World War II, started called and e-mailing. One of is messages found its way to John Williams, a claims representative for United Air Lines, who told the men his rather is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Williams sent a series of e-mails that detailed his own pursuit of the lighter and his zeal to help Wingett, whom he called a “great American.”

One message caught the eye of Jerry Golladay, a TSA aviation manager whose e-mail said he was a retired Navy veteran. “No amount of effort will be spared until we have this figured out,” Golladay wrote at one point. “It is an extreme honor to be of service to and American Armed Forces veteran, especially WWII.”

TSA employees, prodded by the veterans and determined to help, embarked on an intensive hunt that included an examination of videotapes showing the screening process at Dulles Airport and the sorting of thousands of confiscated items.

“They came up empty-handed,” said Ron Sokolov, the TSA’s executive director in the Office of Customer Service and Education. Another TSA official instructed them to try again.

That second search turned up the lighter, loose on a shelf, Sokolov said.

United's John Williams called Wingett at home to give him the news.

"He said he had it and would forward it to Kevin Coady,” Wingett said, “I said that would be very well.”

Wingett is flying home today and expects to have the lighter this afternoon. He said he’s not surprised by all the help he got from people he’d never met.

“I would say that a veteran will help a veteran whenever he can.” Said Wingett. “I try to do it to veterans new and old myself.”

mikefrancis@news.oregonian.com

I know they have to be consistent. But, I’m willing to bet that if the passengers on the plane with Mr. Wingett had been polled they probably would have been willing to risk flying with the 83 year old veteran and his empty, flintless lighter. I decided to copy the whole story because it names so many people who helped this story have a great ending.

WE?

I posted this and then got to thinking it sounded a little snarky but, I think I'll take my courage in both hands and repost it.

I'm only going to make this comment about the president's speech. I have to admit I only know what I read in the papers. It was on during dinner and I wanted to remain one with the excellent omelett I'd just finished.

We're hearing a lot about how "we" have to stay the course.

"What do you mean 'we' Kemo Sabe?"

A GOVERNOR WITH TOO MUCH TIME ON HIS HANDS?

There are some great columnists out there and I think I'll be copying some in more often. Bob Herbert is a favorite. Molly Ivins and Leonard Pitts are usually good sources of information too.

All I’m going to say on this subject is that the governor of Florida appears to have a lot of time on his hands. This kind of keep looking unitl you can pin something, anything on a person is not what we’re used to in the US. The former Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, places like that, the United States, no.

Bob Herbert (bobherb@nytimes.com) is columnist for the New York Times

GOVERNOR BUSH KEEPS UP WITH WITCH HUNT.

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” asked Joseph Welch in his famous confrontation with the pathologically cruel Joe McCarthy. “Have you left no sense of decency?”

More than a half-century later, I would ask the same question of Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush.

In an abuse of power that has been widely denounced, Gov. Bush has tried to keep the Terri Schiavo circus alive by sending state prosecutors on a witch-hunt against her husband, Michael.

The state attorney who has been pushed by the governor into pursuing this case told me he has seen nothing to indicate that a crime was committed. Nevertheless, the inquiry continues.

Gov. bush asked Bernie McCabe the state attorney for Pinellas County, to “take a fresh look” at this already exhaustively investigated case to determine, among other things, whether Michael Schiavo has perhaps waited too long to call for help after discovering that his wife had collapsed early one morning 15 years ago.

McCabe did not seem particularly enthusiastic about this mission. “I wouldn’t call it an investigation,” he told me in a telephone conversation. The word “investigation,” he said, “is a term of art in my business.”

He then explained: “When I conduct an investigation, it would mean that I have a criminal predicate. In other words, that I have some indication that a crime has occurred. That’s my job. In this circumstance, that does not exist at this time. So what I’m attempting to do is respond to the governor’s request by conducting what I’m calling an “Inquiry” to see if I can resolve the issues he raised.”

He chuckled at his use of the word inquiry. “It may be a distinction without a difference.”

What ever term is used, the governor’s continued pursuit of Michael Schiavo in the absence of any evidence that he has done anything wrong is a clear example of government power being used as a club to punish someone for political reasons. The unwarranted harassment of an ordinary citizen by the most powerful, political figure in his state is an affront to the very idea of freedom that Gov. Bush and his brother in the White House are so fond of preaching.

Terri Schiavo died March 31 following the court-ordered removal of her feeding tube. An autopsy supported Michael Schiavo’s contention that his wife had been in a persistent vegetative state. She was unaware of anything and incapable of recovering. At her death at 41, Terri Schiavo’s withered brain was half the normal size for a woman her age.

Gov. Bush was one of the leaders of the pack of politicians who vehemently opposed Michael Schiavo’s efforts to have his wife’s feeding tube removed. Much of what was said was outrageous.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. A physician, said:” All you have to do is look at her on TV. Any doctor with any conscience can look at her and know that she does not have a terminal disease and know that she has some function.”

All agree that Terri Schiavo is now dead, but Gov. Bush insists on keeping the craziness going.

Michael Schiavo has said that his wife collapsed about 4:30 or 5 o’clock in the morning and that he quickly called 911. He has always stressed that he was making a rough estimate about the time. His call to 911 was recorded at 5:4 a.m.

Quick, try to remember with any precision the exact time of a traumatic incident that happened to you or a relative 10 or 15 years ago. Not only is it difficult to do, but the degree of precision deteriorates as the years pass.

Gov Bush’s continued pursuit of Michael Schiavo is not just pointless, it’s cruel.

I pressed McCabe, the state attorney. If there’s no evidence that a crime has been committed, I asked, then what is the purpose of the inquiry?

“My purpose,” he said, “is simply to respond to the governor. The governor’s asked me to do something, and I’m going to try to do it.”

Welcome to power politics, American style.

ANOTHER BUMPER STICKER

Saw this one on the way home from the produce stand.

"My boss is a Jewish carpenter."

On the other side of the car was

"A woman's place in the House....the Senate....and the Oval Office"

:-)

FROM THE LOCAL PAPER

This is from our local paper in Eugene. I think it's good enough to copy and post verbatim. I can certainly relate to how he feels only from the other side. I'm a Democrat, but that membership is on pretty thin ice right now.

EUGENE REGISTER GUARD GUEST VIEWPOINT

The Party’s Over for Betrayed Republican

By James Chaney

As of today, after 25 years, I am no longer a Republican

I take this step with deep regret, and a deep sense of betrayal.

I still believe in the vast power of markets to inspire ideas, motivate solutions and eliminate waste. I still believe in international vigilance and a strong defense, because this world will always be home to people who will avidly seek to take or destroy what we have guilt as a nation. I still believe in the protection of individuals and business from the influence and expense of an over-involved government. I still believe in the hand-in-hand concepts of separation of church and state and absolute freedom to worship, in the rights of the states to govern themselves without undo federal interference, and in the host of other things that defined me as a Republican.

My problem is this: I believe in principles and ideals which my party has systematically discarded in the last 10 years.

My Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, and George H. W. Bush. It was a party of honesty and accountability. It was a party of tolerance, and practicality and honor. It was a party that faced facts and dealt with reality, and that crafted common- sense solutions to problems based on the facts as they were, not as we wished them to be, or even worse, as we make them up. It was a party that told the truth, even when the truth came hard. And now, it is none of those things.

Fifty years from now, the Republican Party of this era will be judged by how we provided for the nation’s future on three core issues: how we led the world on the environment, how we minded the business of running our country in such a way that we didn’t go bankrupt, and whether we gracefully accepted our place on the world’s stage as its only superpower. Sadly we have built the foundation for dismal failure on all three counts. And we’ve done it in such a way that we shouldn’t be surprised if neither the American people nor the world trusts us again.

My party has repeatedly ignored, discarded and even invented science to suit its needs, most spectacularly as to global warming. We have an opportunity and the responsibility to lead the world on this issue, but instead we’ve chosen greed, shortsightedness and deliberate ignorance.

We have mortgaged the country’s fiscal future in a way that no Democratic congress or administration ever did, and to justify the tax cuts that have brought us here, we’ve simoly changed the rules. I matured as a Republican believing that uncontrolled deficit spending is harmful and irresponsible; I still do. But the party has yet to explain to me why it’s a good thing now, other than to say “…because we say so.”

Our greatest failure, though, has been in our role as superpower. This world needs justice, democracy and compassion and as the keystone of those things, it needs one thing above all else: truth.

Republican decisions made in 2002 and 2003 have killed almost 2,000 of the most capable patriots our country has to offer—volunteers, every one. Support for those decisions was gathered through what appeared at the time to be sping and marketing, but which now turns out to have deliberate planning and falsehood. The Blair government’s internal documentation only confirms what has been suspected for years: Americans are dying every day for Republican lies first crafted in 2002, expanded and embellished upon in 2003, and which continue to this day. The calculated deception is now burned into the legacy of the party, every bit as much as Reagan’s triumph in the cold War, or Nixon’s disgrace over Watergate.

I could go on and on – about how we have compromise dour international integrity by sanctioning torture, about how we are systematically dismantling the civil liberties that it took us two centuries to define and preserce and about how we have substituted bullying, brinksmanship and “staying on message” for real political discourse – but those three issues are enough.

We’re poisoning our planet through gluttony and ignorance.

We’re teetering on the brink of self-inflicted in solvency.

We’re selfishly and needlessly sacrificing the best of a generation.

And we’re lying about it.

While is has compiled this record of failure and  deception, the party which I’m leaving today has spent its time enery and political capital trying to save Terri Schiavo, battling the threat of single-sex unions, fighting medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide, manufacturing political crises over presidential nominees, and selling privatized Social Security to an America that isn’t buying. We fiddle while Rome burns.

Enough is enough I quit.

(James Caney is a Eugene attorney who has been in private practice for more than 20 years, and who has been a registered Republica since 1980.)

I think it's an excellent piece of work.

WHERE I'VE BEEN

I haven't been posting as much lately. Several reasons.

One, I was spending some time with the prequels to the prequels to Frank Herbert's Dune series. The books aren't bad, but they aren't magic with a capital M either. Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson have managed to tie into all the strands of the earlier works. In excruciating detail. I found out far more than I ever wanted to know about some characters and not nearly enough about others. The body count is beyond astronomical and most of them died very badly. Sometimes less is more and descriptions of executions, etc. fall into that category for me. My imagination is usually far scarier than anything anybody and write.

Two, getting over dental extractions and trying to work full time apparently takes more out of you than I expected. That and several trips to the doctor to have adjustments made. Things are getting better, but I've been feeling pretty drained.

My joints have been giving me semi-fits at about two week intervals. It's been hard enough work at a desk all day without trying to spend enough time on the computer at home long enough to get anything done more complicated than commenting on my favorite journals and sending some e-mails. I'm on the upswimg again, Yaaay.

So, here I am this morning feeling pretty darn good and trying to make up for lost time.

A NEW TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT

Apparently Karl Rove has taken a mini baseball bat to a hornet's nest...........again. In a partisan speech in New York on Wednesday Rove ridiculed Liberals for a wimpish response to terrorism in 2001. Responses by various Democratic spokesmen were predictable.

For the record, I have no use for Karl Rove. The man is a political disaster, a successful disaster but still bad news. What can you say about a man who was accused of bugging his own office while he was running Bush's first campaign for governer of Texas, finding the bugs and then accusing the opposition of doing it?

I just don't think all the uproar over his speech is going to do any good. If Howard Dean found the the cure for Aids, cancer and the common cold all rolled into one, Rove would probably find a way to make it sound like a bad thing.

Let's just accept that one, Karl Rove will never apologize for anything. Two, the president is not going to fire the man who charted his rise to political power. No way, no how, just accept it and move on. Although, I suppose that all the rhetoric creates a welcome breeze in the parts of the country that are suffering the current heat wave. All those sound bites have to be good for something.

So, my fellow outcasts, let's try a little experiment. Ignore him as much as possible. Just shake your head sadly, mummering quietly something to the effect of "what can you expect......" Sort of the way polite families treated the subject of the family remittance man. (The term hails from the British colonial era. Unambitious or embarrassing family members got shipped out the colonies to minor positions. Hopefully they couldn't do much damage out there and at least they weren't causing trouble at home.)

With luck, a non-responsive response with provoke more outrageous claims. Maybe, we'll get to the point where enough of the president's supporters will see just how small this man really is.